We are proud because for more than 5 years we are the first blog in Google Search for Fake Conferences. Our Blog accepts now more than 2500 visits per day from different IP addresses. We are the first blog. We reveal scandals of fake academic publishers.

Saturday, 11 October 2014

100 Journals of the Pseudo-Publisher Hindawi lost their ISI Indexing and lost their Impact Factor. Why Hindawi Journals are fake independently on their Indexing

Why Hindawi Journals are fake independently on their Indexing 1) Hindawi Journals do not have editor-in-chief2) They don't have peer reviewThe review is quite skin and not real3) A secretariat, usually a person without Ph.D. decides the acceptance of the papers4) They demand a lot of money for rapid publication (Gold Pay-and-Publish Model)5) They have accepted several Garbage, SciGen (machine generated) articles.6) Hindawi has bribed many indexes in the past

Will Hindawi return the money to authors that believed that these Journals are indexed in ISI and did pay for an ISI publication?

10 comments:

I have to mention that reputed journals also sometime publish low quality, plagiaristic or even computer-generated articles. It is well known and many examples can be found in internet! Moreover, due to long review time the safety of new ideas are not guaranteed in the reputed publishers. Your paper may be rejected after several months of peer review consideration in a reputed journal and suddenly someone else can publish “independently” the same ideas. Arxiv.com and fast publishing journals can prevent it effectively. Therefore we must think before making such statements that because of money the fast publishers publish mostly low quality papers. Many reputed journals also publish low quality papers once fee is made. It is not a problem when a low quality paper is published in a reputed journal, but it is a real problem when a high quality paper is rejected in the reputed journal.

While we await formal scientific comment on the paper, let’s consider some of its more obvious features.The Hindawi journal is one of a fast-growing number of open-access academic journals that charge authors a fee for the service of peer-review and publication. In this case, the fee is $1,200.In principle, open access is a great idea. It has long been a source of frustration to me, as a freelance journalist, that it is difficult to access scientific papers behind pay-walls when you don’t work for an institution that has appropriate subscriptions. Even one-day access to single papers can run into hundreds of rands.However, the author-pays model does have its detractors, because of obvious conflicts of interests. Some in the scientific community call them predatory, or the dark side of publishing. Hindawi has been described as dodgy, and its flagship journal has been the subject of controversy over fraudulent attempts to boost its standing, or impact factor. It appears to have taken corrective measures, has been removed from a widely-read blacklist, and does appear ina directory of nearly 10,000 open-access journals that claims to assesses them for quality.Not being a scientist myself, I can only guess at Hindawi’s true standing, but it seems fair to give it a pass.

Not so, say scientists I approached for comment on Van Tonder’s paper. The two who got back to me before my deadline both asked that I withhold their names for professional reasons, though neither have ties to the oil and gas industry.One claims never to have heard of the publication. He also noted that it is poorly edited for grammar, which I wasn’t going to raise, but is most certainly true. The other said: “I wouldn’t be seen dead publishing in these fly by night journals. They keep asking me to be on editorial boards; look at the list of unknowns – this is the sort of open source publications anyone can get a paper in, and is doing harm to the quality science community.”But, now that we finally have something concrete to consider, let us not be churlish, and try to evaluate the paper’s content.One point that raised an eyebrow at the outset was the citation of Osborn, Vengosh, Warner and Jackson, of Duke University. If you followed the shale gas story, you may recall it as the study that found higher levels of methane in selected water wells near gas drilling operations.It was widely criticised for its small sample size and cherry-picking wells for testing. It found none of the tell-tale chemicals that could have acted as tracers to prove a link between shale gas wells and groundwater contamination. And while the authors themselves took to the newspapers to trumpet “strong evidence that shale drilling is risky”, this contradicted the paper’s actual conclusion: “We found no evidence for contamination of drinking-water samples with deep saline brines or fracturing fluids.”Subsequent studies, such as Molofsky et al, which sampled more than ten times as many wells, confirmed that stray methane in water wells was unrelated to shale gas operations.It is unclear to me why a new scientific paper that purports to examine the contamination of freshwater aquifers by shale gas drilling would cite the Duke study, but not the more recent and more thorough Molofsky study.

Another new study, by Samuel Flewelling and Manu Sharma, entitled Constraints on Upward Migration of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid and Brine, says that suggestions of high flow rates and short travel times for deep brines near hydraulic fracturing zones “contradicts the body of literature on the hydrology of sedimentary basins”. It singles out the work of Tom Myers, Daniel Rozell, Sheldon Reaven and Nathaniel Warner for criticism, all of whom Van Tonder relies upon.Flewelling’s paper concludes: “In sum, rapid upward migration of [fracking] fluid or brine via bedrock would require the co-occurrence of upward head gradients and high bedrock permeabilities. As we discuss in this article, these two conditions are mutually exclusive, indicating that widespread and rapid upward migration of [fracking] fluid and brine through bedrock is not physically plausible.”Clearly, there is some disagreement here. My scientific sources were again more scathing about it than I have any right to be as a mere journalist. Asked whether it establishes the claims made to the media in 2012 that freshwater aquifer pollution in the Karoo is inevitable because of artesian brine aquifers at Ecca/Dwyka depths, one said, “No it does not establish any claim to that effect.”The other elaborated: “[Van Tonder's paper] is so ‘opaque’ as to be just about meaningless to any of the laypeople and scientists currently interested in the effects of fracking in the Karoo. I presume that ‘sampling’ in the context of the paper is a statistical term and bears no relevance to water sampling. The authors acknowledge the data gaps and uncertainties and I think that this is just an academic and premature exercise. There’s nothing new here – just a lot of mathematical/statistical manipulations to try and put numbers to scenarios that we are already aware of and are striving towards gathering data to be able to analyse and predict realistically.”He added: “I won’t be spending any more time trying to make sense of it and suggest that the local scientific community won’t take much notice of it except as another esoteric and premature analysis.”But let us suppose that I, my sources, and all the scientists I cited are wrong. Let us suppose that it is plausible that hydraulic fracturing chemicals from deep shales can contaminate shallow groundwater in high enough concentrations and over short enough time spans to cause significant concern.What does Van Tonder’s published, peer-reviewed paper have to say about that? It concludes: “The study reveals that, in the case of the Karoo, the idea of fracking will be successful if and only if a well and the entire fracked reservoir are plugged with, for example, cement, otherwise many aquifers in the Karoo will be polluted.”So, science, having speculated about a potential problem, has also provided us with a fairly simple preventative measure. And since Van Tonder once again serves on the Karoo Water Expert Group, it seems likely that such a solution will be included in the final regulations.That should make everyone happy, but don’t expect the activists or the sensationalist media to tell you this. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check if my sources have unholy ties to the cement industry. DMNote: Daily Maverick has confirmed the identities of the anonymous sources quoted in this article, and is satisfied with their credentials as independent scientific experts. — Ed.

Hot on the heels of the hapless Science Publishing Group, I have received solicitation spam from another dodgy OA publisher, Hindawi Publishing in Cairo, with another odd on-line archaeology journal.

The Journal of Archaeology has 71 academics on its editorial board. And a strangely generic name. What it doesn’t have is any published papers yet, after months on-line, or an editor-in-chief. So I wrote to some board members at European universities, and they replied that they thought the journal was probably legit, though they weren’t exactly sure. “The lack of published papers and low manuscript turnover has concerned me, yet they appear very professional in approach”, says one scholar, and “I personally know a good handful of the other Editors including a senior member of staff in my department. They are very well respected and knowledgeable so I would be surprised if we have all fallen for a scam, but I will look into it further”, says another.

I need HELP...from Antonio on down! I too rec'd word that all three of my papers were accepted for "International Nursing Informatics Conference" (ICNI) but due to what they say is a 'registration error' (my bank, Bank of America disagrees) they told me today I am not presenting after all. Naturally, my trip was approved by my university, my flight and hotel arranged THEN I read this line of thoughts after googling WASET. WASET has no real phone number, no email per se, no person's name (real or imagined) that I can find at the meeting site .

While at the real American Nurse Informatics Conference in Las Vegas recently, one of the key players there (for ANIA) seemed perplexed when I mentioned an international meeting in Amsterdam (my meeting, May 16 17). Said she had an office in Amsterdam and had heard of no such meeting..... The image way above for Artificial Neuro mtg is of course, identical to the images I am used to when logging in to the WASET site where communication is positively blotto/maddening. My charges for the meeting have not gone through, my upset as of this very morning is that it appears after my dreams/hopes of attending and presenting are shattered....and early this morning, I entertained going anyway as an attendee, intending to register for the meeting at the site (in Amsterdam) and 'givin' 'em hell when I get there.

Should I call the hotel to verify IF there's a meeting? If yes, should I go--I don't want to sanction this behavior if it is, indeed, a scam. What is the conclusion of those in this thread?

Antonio, I will try to reach you directly.....I will contact ANIA (American Nursing Informatics) at some point but this isn't really their affair, just to warn them. What attracted me to the "meeting" is their repeated mention of getting the paper(s) published, indeed they implied that if I had acceptance of the abstract that the article is/would be accepted...yet I later found it impossible to 'get' the instructions at the site for formatting and submitting. So, I gave up that part settling instead on presenting per se and looking for a home for the publications later, later=now.

I am schedule to leave Los Angeles May 2-this Friday vacationing in Ireland with family till evening of 15th when I leave Cork Ireland for Amsterdam, anyone?

You are right. Hindawi publishers are fake and bogus . Hindawi is quite ridiculous. It is true that these 100 Journals of the Pseudo-Publisher Hindawi lost their ISI Indexing and lost their Impact Factor. Yes, I completely and absolutely agree that Hindawi Journals are fake independently on their Indexing

Bogus IEEE Conferences in 2014. This Conference CSCI 2014 exists in IEEE Data Base and has the official approval and sponsorship of IEEE, but it is quite bogus: No Chairman, No Reviewers, No Committee, No Address of the Organizers, No supporting University. This is the Absolutely Junk IEEE Conference: http://www.americancse.org/events/csci2014/publication